The present invention is related to an image forming apparatus for forming an image on an optical disk, and to an image forming method.
Generally, recordable optical disks such as CD-R (Compact Disk-Recordable) and CD-RW (Compact Disk-Rewritable) have been widely used for recording a large capacity of information. Optical disk recording apparatus for recording various sorts of information such as music data on these optical disks are constituted so that laser a recording plane formed on one of side planes of these optical disk is irradiated with laser light in response to information to be recorded.
In the above-explained optical disks, in order to identify various sorts of data which have been recorded on the recording planes, in many cases, images such as titles have been applied onto the other side of label planes opposite to the one of the side recording planes. In general, these images are applied in such a manner that the images such as the titles are printed out on label sheets by employing printer apparatus and the like, and also, these image-printed label sheets are stuck to the label planes of the optical disks.
However, in order to apply the images such as the titles to the optical disks as explained above, since the printer apparatus must be separately employed in addition to the optical disk recording apparatus, economical loads given to users are increased. Furthermore, such cumbersome works are forcibly given to these users. That is, after the information has been recorded on the recording planes of the optical disks by employing the optical disk recording apparatus, it is not only work of picking up the information-recorded optical disks from the optical disk recording apparatus, but also, the label sheets must be printed by using the above-described printer apparatus, and the printed label sheets must be stuck to these information-recorded optical disks.